


tales of an endless heart

by jdphoenix



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Pregnancy, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29966754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jdphoenix/pseuds/jdphoenix
Summary: Little more than twenty-four hours after being swept away by the monolith, Jemma returns to Earth.Five ways things might have gone and how they really did.
Relationships: Jemma Simmons/Grant Ward
Comments: 5
Kudos: 41





	tales of an endless heart

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Bishop Briggs' "River."

**If Coulson were frightened…**

He would sit her in the chair in his office, same as he did the day after she returned from Hydra. There would be a cup of tea and he would say, “Sorry it’s not better. That’s why I can never go undercover as an Englishman.”

Her laughter would make the tea … not sweeter. He really is terrible at it. But it would make the memories come more easily when she began.

“It’s a portal to an alien world,” she would say in that somewhat detached tone she knows she adopts whenever a particular case is too personal. The same one she used so long ago when telling him about the Chitauri virus and her chances. That’s why he would have brought her to his office. He wouldn’t be able to bear putting her in quarantine again, not without proof it was necessary. “I was lucky enough to land in a desert with no large wildlife to speak of—at least not that I saw. Luckier still that I landed where I did. In twenty-four hours the sun never rose and I suspect, given the plant life, that it never truly does. If the portal had opened a few thousand miles away in either direction, I could have burned or frozen to death.”

Coulson, who would be leaning against the front of his desk rather than sitting behind it, would reach out then to take her hand. “It’s a good thing it didn’t. We’d hate to lose you, Jemma.”

And she would probably cry then. Curl in on herself and clutch her stomach and lose herself in her tears for a moment or two. Because it was frightening being so far from help. And she would be tired, after a full day of chasing the portal.

“How,” she would ask in an effort to compose herself, “did you figure it out? How to open it, I mean?”

When she saw the portal again, kicking up sand a few dozen yards away, she knew immediately it must be Fitz. He’d discovered she was missing—so _fast_ , but then he was probably coming back to nail down the details of their date; the silly man left without even giving her a proper time to be ready—and somehow, as he so often does, hit upon just the thing to solve the unsolvable. But whatever his method for reopening the portal might have been, it wasn’t very long-lasting. The portal was gone again before she got near.

An hour later, she saw the sand kicked up again. And again it was too far for her to reach before it shut.

Again and again. For _hours_. She followed it across open fields of sand, over rocky hills, even tracked it along the side of a cliff too steep for her to climb. Until finally— _finally—_ she caught up to it at the bottom of a ravine and threw herself through.

“I was given to understand in all the years it’s been with SHIELD, no one’s ever managed to control the monolith’s fluctuations in material state. What did Fitz do?”

And that’s when Coulson would look at her with some confusion. Because she’s right, SHIELD never has managed to figure the monolith out, not in the slightest. It would take more than one lovesick engineer to do it, she’s sure.

Coulson wouldn’t have an answer because Jemma doesn’t have an answer. Because she isn’t sitting in his office, drinking horrendous tea, and being debriefed on her harrowing time on an alien world. And she certainly isn’t crying. Not while Hydra is watching her every move.

**If Bobbi wasn’t thorough…**

Jemma would wake, hours and hours after her ordeal, to Bobbi pulling a needle from her arm.

“Blood tests,” she would say. “No telling what sorts of diseases there are on an alien planet.”

She’d remember herself immediately, good specialist that she is, and turn to add, “But you’re fine, I’m sure. It’s just a precaution.”

“Of course it is,” Fitz would say because of course he’d be nearby, supervising the tests if not taking part. “You’re going to be fine. You wouldn’t cancel on me _again_ , would you?”

She would laugh at his teasing. She might even be distracted from watching Bobbi work, from fear of just what the tests will show.

But Jemma doesn’t get to watch the tests be done. Hydra are hardly going to let her loiter in the lab. Quarantine aside, a woman of her skills is far too dangerous in such a setting.

And even if it _were_ SHIELD doing the tests, the result would come out the same because Bobbi’s in the infirmary herself, still recovering from the torture she endured just three weeks ago. It would be Anne or a similarly qualified medtech doing Jemma’s lab work, not a biologist with field med training. They wouldn’t only test for what they feared to find, they would run a standard blood panel as well. The same one that Hydra is no doubt running at this very moment.

It’s only a matter of time before they realize the leverage they have over her.

**If she went on her date with Fitz…**

The tests would come back clear and she wouldn’t have to break her date with Fitz. Again. Since it was meant to be _last_ night—but they wouldn’t talk about that. He’d be so happy to be out with her—he’s already so in love with her already—he wouldn’t mind waiting the day. Especially not when he came so close to losing her entirely.

They would talk about lighter things, normal things. They would laugh and get along as they always have. And at the end of the night when he dropped her off and kissed her goodbye, she would keep her hand fisted in his jacket and suggest he might want to come in and tell her more about how he figured out the monolith.

Of course he wouldn’t actually need to tell her a thing. They would be too busy snogging. And doing … other things. The sorts of things she used to laugh at when people suggested she might want to or already have done them with her best friend.

And a few weeks later, when she confessed that in all the craziness of falling through space and falling love, she just forgot to take her pill, Fitz would be happy. He loves her. He wants to be with her. And first pregnancies tend to run long so … so he might not even notice when …

But this all requires that Jemma be the worst sort of person. Someone willing to spend a lifetime lying just to protect the life growing inside of her.

She laughs to herself, there in the bed in the quarantine room to which she’s been confined.

She’s almost grateful that it’s Hydra who recovered her. They saved her from that mistake. She’s really not sure she wouldn’t have made it otherwise. As it is, she’s quite happy to let Hydra believe whatever they like about the father.

**If Skye’s people were better at keeping records…**

“Lincoln sent us photos,” Skye would say. “I was halfway across the planet and he was sending me blurry cell phone images of thousand year-old books because he could tell how freaked I was when I called. How sweet is he?”

“Very sweet,” Jemma would agree over ice cream while they sat huddled knee-to-knee in her bed late at night.

“I couldn’t read them, obviously, but I sent them on to Fitz and he put them through the translation program and it told him everything he needed to know. About the monolith being a portal. About how to use sound waves to open it. Lucky, huh?” And Skye would vibrate the ice cream right off her spoon, keeping it hovering until it was close enough to swallow up with one bite.

“ _Very_ ,” Jemma would agree again. And she would squeeze Skye’s hand because she’d be ever so grateful to have been rescued. Especially since, if it had taken them any longer to work it out, she might not have seen the next portal opening. And then she never would have known it moved. And neither would they. And she would still be there.

Only they didn’t figure it out and it isn’t Skye’s hand she’s holding. It’s a woman named Stephanie Malick’s, who’s been terribly apologetic about her treatment and who explains the science of it all—as much as she’s able to, obviously being a layman and far beneath Jemma’s genius—with a similar tone of apology.

“After my father died,” she says and Jemma can’t muster enough sympathy to do more than squeeze her hand, not for a head of Hydra, “I went back over those old records about the Distant Star mission. It seemed impossible that it would have failed. So I decided we must not have enough information on our end about what’s going on on _that_ end. The only way I could see to make any headway was to keep the portal open. Or at least to keep opening it on a regular basis hoping _something_ might come through.”

She smiles that stars-in-her-eyes smile at her again, clutching Jemma’s hands tightly between them and leaning in despite that they’re already sitting so close their knees are touching. Count a lack of care for personal space on the list of Hydra’s sins.

“And you did,” she says, her voice near breaking. “He sent you to us.”

And that is when she tells Jemma why her dream of rescue wouldn’t have worked anyway. Because surely if the Inhumans knew about the monolith’s workings, they would have known what its purpose was. That the world it led to wasn’t simply any alien world, but a prison.

**If May found out first…**

At the Playground, Jemma would have been put in quarantine. She would have had countless tests run on her person. Blood tests and scans and observations for weeks. It would have been impossible to hide she was pregnant.

But it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.

May, she thinks. May would have been watching it all, determined to guard Jemma even if she couldn’t protect her from something as small as a microbe. She would have found out, possibly at the same time the technicians did, about her condition.

Jemma can see her agreeing that it was concerning, that it needed to be reported at once to those higher up—Coulson and those still alive from the _Iliad’s_ council. And while the technician’s back was turned, she would ICER him and neatly shred the results so that no one else might find them before she was ready.

“You’re pregnant,” she would say when she approached Jemma in the dead of night. She would give her a moment to recover from the news and then ask “Do you have any idea who the father might be?” in a leading sort of tone. “Someone you might have sought for comfort after Trip? Maybe someone you were so happy was alive after the _Iliad_?”

That would be Jemma’s chance to lie.

But it would be May. May of all people. Perhaps the one person Jemma would know she didn’t _need_ to lie to.

“It was Ward,” she would say, somewhat roughly. “When we were in the arctic. I tried to kill him and … things … escalated.”

Jemma doesn’t tell that to Hydra of course. But she will tell her child. One day.

Lying on the plush bed she’s been giving in Stephanie Malick’s country estate—only the best for the mother of their god’s child (or the mother of their god; Hydra is unsure just _what_ Jemma is carrying but they’re certain it’s divine)—Jemma rests her hands on her prominent stomach and swears that one day they’ll be free and safe. And that when her child is old enough to understand, she’ll tell them…

Her fingers curl against the rich fabric of her dress. Her maternity wardrobe is designer.

She doesn’t think she’ll be able to bear telling him or her that she hated their father. She’s not even sure herself she does. She’s had plenty of time to think in her confinement and wonders, would she have let things _escalate_ the way they did if that were the case?

Back in her fantasy, May’s mouth would twitch up on one side. “‘Escalated,’” she would whisper to herself. And that would be her only comment on that. She would help Jemma to escape, whispering that those from the false SHIELD, even if they believed her, would never trust her and, worse, might want to use the child against the father.

She would lead Jemma carefully through the corridors to a waiting car and then give her directions to follow to safety. It would mean leaving SHIELD, but Jemma doesn’t think she would mind.

There isn’t a single fantasy she’s indulged in during her months of pampered captivity that didn’t include her pregnancy. That says quite a lot, she thinks, about her priorities.

**The truth...**

It isn’t any surprise, given those fantasies, how things go that bright and shining morning when her door opens to reveal, not Stephanie, but Grant Ward.

“Well,” he says. “Not the virgin mother I imagined.”

“What are you doing here?” As he’s carrying two pistols—one he holsters at his hip, the other in the back of his jeans—she has a pretty good idea already, but she’s so shocked at the sight of him it’s all she can think to ask.

She sits up to face him, but doesn’t manage more. She’s just beginning her third trimester—though Hydra thinks she’s still deep in her second—and feeling every bit of it.

He rolls his eyes dismissively, though not at her. “I can’t very well take over Hydra while they’ve got a bouncing baby _god_ running around, now can I?”

Instinctively, her hand covers her stomach. “Ward, it’s not-”

He waves aside her protests as he crosses the room. “I know.” He helps her to her feet and doesn’t let go of her hands once he has.

It could be pointed out that neither does she, but she’s spent the last six months with only Stephanie and her guards to keep her company. A familiar face—even an enemy’s—is a welcome change.

“Even if Malick wasn’t under the impression Whitehall sacrificed you to the god three months before the last time I saw you?” He makes it a question, no doubt wondering just how much Jemma contributed to that false impression.

As she didn’t add much—aside from feigning contrition and peppering her stories of the planet with a few minor details about being taught the error of her ways—she only shrugs, unrepentant.

“I didn’t think you’d fuck some loser who thinks he’s a _god_ ,” Ward finishes.

“You’re probably right.” Though she hates to admit he knows her so well, it _is_ unlikely. Much as she respects Sif, it took a great deal of self-control not to harangue her at every mention of magic.

“So you know-?” she begins. She doesn’t think she can say it, but Ward only raises an eyebrow, apparently willing to wait to hear her out. Wanker. “That you’re the father,” she says, the words somehow coming easier than she imagined in her fantasies. Oddly, not even Ward’s triumphant grin can make her regret it.

“Yeah, I kinda figured it out. Not like you had many other options, right?”

There are retorts she’d like to make to that—she could _so_ have slept with Fitz—but they only remind her of what she’s come to realize over the last few months.

“None I deserved.”

The truth is that she didn’t begin her thoughts of lying to the team after Hydra took her. She began before. Before the monolith even. When Fitz asked her on that date, she agreed because her first thought was that if they slept together that night she might be able to pass off Ward’s child as his. It had nothing at all to do with any alien planet or false gods.

Ward’s eyebrows rise and his voice lightens with amusement as he takes entirely the wrong meaning. “Think pretty highly of yourself, huh?”

She tips her head back. “Are you implying a god _wouldn’t_ want to sleep with me?”

He pulls her close, releasing her hands so that he can wrap one arm around her back and rest the other hand against the swell of her belly. “I’m implying if one had, I’d have to kill it.”

There’s the possessive nature Ward displayed so well last year. But she’d be lying if she said the thrill it sends through her was entirely of fear.

She should be afraid. For herself and for their child. Ward’s obsession saw Skye _kidnapped_ and Bobbi _tortured_ , after all.

But if things had been different, she doesn’t know that they’d be better. She could never have told the team the truth, not after all that Ward had done. Saying he forced himself on her would have made her complicit in his inevitable murder. And lying about the father would have led to questions later, when it became clear the pregnancy was progressing too quickly. There might even have been those within SHIELD who assumed the same that Stephanie did and insisted she be kept locked up—or worse—to ensure her child was not a threat.

No, she thinks, this is best. Ward is dangerous, but only to those who threaten his loved ones—Bobbi is proof of that. He’ll keep her child safe. And, she supposes, if her fantasies have taught her anything, it’s that she really is too willing to lie and cheat even those she loves if her reasons are good enough. They’re quite suited.

She wraps her arms around him and rests her head against his shoulder, above the hard planes of his tac vest. “Good,” she sighs and feels the sharp edge of his grin in the kiss he presses to her hair.


End file.
